Peter Enderlein

our complex camp

For this Safari we had settled on two low camp cots, without tent, and a few essentials such as rice and tea and rum, and whatever tinned goods might be rattling around in the rear of my old Land Rover. For the rest we would make do as we went along. Even so, our camp was infinitely more complex than the Hazda hearths, and soon seemed littered. Both of us have a passion for travelling light, deploring the ponderous caravanserai which Anglo-Saxons in particular tend to conceive of as safari's - the table, camp chairs, ice chests, private toilet tents, truckloads of provender and swarming staff that permit the colonial amenities of the Hotel Norfolk "into the blue". Like myself, Peter [Enderlein], has often been ashamed in front of Africans by the amount of equipment that his white friends required. Yet Africans admire wealth, and anyway, they do not make judgements in such matters, but accept a different culture as it is. The people at Gidabembe, who still trust, are neither subservient nor rude. Here was the gentleness, the loving attention to the moment, that is vanishing in East Africa, as it has vanished in the western world.